During the war, Morse made an important mark when he took an absence from a professorship at MIT to organize the U.S. Navy Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group. ASWORG, as it was called, played an important part in the Allies successfully sinking Axis submarines and U-boats. After the war, he co-authored Methods of Operations Research, the first American OR textbook, with his noted collaborator George Kimball.
In 1952, Morse became a founding member and first president of the Operations Research Society of America. His career in the field flourished at MIT. There he was appointed Chairman of the Committee on Operations Research (1952), organized the first summer seminars in OR, and, in 1954, formed the MIT Operations Research Center. The Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary next spring.
Revered during his lifetime by colleagues in the field that he helped create, Dr. Morse died in 1985.
The INFORMS commemoration, “100th Anniversary of the birth of Philip M. Morse,” was chaired by Saul I. Gass, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
It included the lectures “Philip M. Morse and the Beginnings,” by Morse’s first Ph.D. student, Institute Professor John D.C. Little, Chair of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management; “Looking for Hemibels,” by Robert M. Oliver, Professor Emeritus, University of California at Berkeley; and “Inventing a Science: Philip Morse and the Establishment of Operations Research,” by William Thomas, a graduate student in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.
The INFORMS session in memory of Philip M. Morse took place at the association’s annual meeting in Atlanta on October 21.